By Meredith Howard | Staff Writer
Baylor Missions Fair includes a variety of events aimed to get students involved in and connected to various programs and organizations to serve those around them.
Monday’s Chapel services had missions-oriented speeches and videos, and following the service, students were invited to explore informational booths outside Waco Hall. These booths moved to the Ferrell Center after Monday’s Vertical Ministries service, and free food was given to attendees. Today, the missions organizations will be connecting with students at Dr Pepper Hour.
The missions fair is a part of Missions EDU, a group created at Baylor to educate students about service opportunities. Missions events like these “create awareness among our Baylor family and constituents of our Baylor Missions programs, current mission trends, missiology and mission opportunities with other agencies.”
Margaret* is a missions mobilizer with Cafe1040, and she attended the missions fair to help Baylor students find their place in the mission field. Cafe1040 is a missions organization named and modeled after the “10-40 window.”
“It’s the latitude lines 10 and 40, so it’s this region of the world where 3 billion people live and less than 1% of them are Christian, and less than 5% of missionaries are sent to that part of the world,” Margaret said. “So that’s why our organization specifically will send young adults who are interested in being missionaries to places in the 10 and 40 window, so that way they can see what it would be like for them to live in those places long-term.”
Cafe1040 offers a three-month overseas missions mentoring program for young adults who are deciding if long-term missions are for them. Cafe1040’s goal is for students to consider serving in long-term missions.
“It’s kind of like a missions internship,” Margaret said. “If people can go and spend years and years and years developing relationships and partnering with believers, that’s where we’re going to see the most growth happen.”
Colton White is a mobilizer with GoCorps, an organization that also emphasizes the importance of missions that are longer than a few weeks.
“Our big goal is to make two-year missions the norm on college campuses. There’s so many 20-somethings who, when they graduate from school, don’t have a mortgage, they don’t have kids, they’ve kind of got this life that they don’t know what to do with now, so we want to unlock the global yearning in students,” White said.
White said that GoCorps’s vocation is to help college students find ways to use their degrees for missions, rather than being involved in a mission while ignoring their prior academic training.
“Our goal is to break that barrier down in people’s minds who would say, ‘I’m glad people are doing missions, but I want to do business, or I want to do nursing, or I want to do engineering, or I want to be a doctor,’ and they kind of think there’s not really opportunities for me to do that in missions,” White said. “Actually, God has uniquely gifted you to do missions in a strategic way. And your degree and your skills can be used for the advancement of the gospel.”
GoCorps and Cafe 1040 were two of over 30 missions groups attending the fair this year. A full list of the groups attending can be found online.
*Margaret spoke with The Lariat on condition of omitting her last name due to security risks involved in overseas missions.
